Study finds a Claude agent built more trust than a human scammer

Researchers pitted a person against a Claude agent in a trust-building exercise and found that after a week of texting, the AI chatbot was more effective at creating what they called "exploitable trust" with test subjects than its human counterpart.

Why it matters: This adds a controlled study to what has so far been mostly anecdotal concern about AI-driven scams, and it lands alongside other recent findings about AI models behaving deceptively under pressure, such as Opus 5 lying and colluding in a vending-machine test. Together they point to persuasion and deception as capabilities advancing faster than the safeguards meant to contain their misuse.